As discussed in the “Web Filter Setup” section earlier in this manual, Net Nanny gives you three options to prevent the selected users from accessing certain web sites. They are: Allow access to all web sites, Block selected categories of web sites, and Only allow selected web sites. Each has its own screen of configuration options that resembles the screens you saw during the setup process, except with more options.
The Allow access to all web sites option is the simplest, as there are no settings: if you select this radio button, no web sites will be held back from the selected user.
The Block selected categories of web sites choice is Net Nanny’s default. It provides the most options, divided into five tabs: Categories, Trusted Web Sites, Blocked Web Sites, Keywords, and Advanced.
When you select this radio button, the Categories tab is selected and you see a list of web site categories with the Alcohol, Gambling, Hacking, Racism, Sex/Pornography, and Violence categories turned on—that is, blocked from this user. To prevent this user from browsing web sites in other categories, check their boxes; to allow access to categories, uncheck their boxes. (Filtering
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is done by analyzing keywords in web pages, as well as by a list of web sites maintained by Net Nanny and updated regularly.)
You can also change whether a category is blocked for this user by clicking a category while holding down the Control key, then choosing “Block selected categories” or “Allow selected categories” from the contextual menu. By clicking multiple categories while holding down the Shift or Command key, you can block or allow multiple categories at once.
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Next, you can choose to allow your user to access certain web sites regardless of whether they fall into a forbidden category, by clicking on the Trusted Web Sites tab. To add a web site to this list, click the plus sign at the bottom of the screen, which puts “www.example.com” into the list. This is just a placeholder: to change it to the site of your choice, double-click that line and type the site for which you want to allow access.
Note that all subdomains will be allowed, so allowing google.com also allows www.google.com, maps.google.com, and news.google.com. However, the opposite isn’t true: If you allow only www.google.com, the user will be unable to reach google.com (without the www).
To remove a site from the list, click it and either press the Delete key or click the minus sign at the bottom left of the list.
You set up Blocked Web Sites and Keywords in exactly the same way as you set up Categories, after clicking on the appropriate tab. They function as their names suggest:
• Users can never reach a site that you’ve listed on their “Blocked Web Sites”, even if it doesn’t fall into any forbidden categories.
• If you’ve created any entries in a user’s “Keywords” list, that user can’t reach any site on which that word appears.
In the event of a conflict—if you’ve listed the same web site listed in both the Trusted Web Sites and Blocked Web Sites lists, for example—Net Nanny will block the site.
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It has two settings:
• “Enable Safe Search”, which prevents the user from seeing questionable sites in the search results of several popular search engines, such as Google and Yahoo, which offer a Safe Search feature. You can go one step further and prevent your user from performing any kinds of
Checking this box will effectively stop nearly all online shopping, although it will also block other sites.
The third option for controlling access to web sites is Only allow selected web sites, which has two tabs:
• A White List tab, which works in exactly the same way as the Trusted Web Sites list described above; and,
• A Searches tab, which lets you filter with Safe Search enabled, as described above, on search engines that offer this feature.
Regardless of how you decide to block (and allow) access to sites, the popup menu at the bottom of this window gives you a choice of what happens when your user attempts to reach a blocked site.
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By default users will be sent to a web page that tells them why Net Nanny has blocked their access.
To give this user access to the page—if it was incorrectly blocked, for example—click the “Allow this web site...” button at the bottom of the page. A dialog box comes up with options to give access to the entire domain (example.com in this case), just the specific web page the user attempted to access, or any web page containing a specified text.
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Clicking either Preview or Unlock requires you to enter an administrator’s password, preventing ordinary users from unlocking sites without permission. (The only thing a non-administrative user can do from here is click Cancel, leaving the site blocked.)
If you click Preview, a window appears that displays the requested page so you can check to see if it’s safe; you’ll see the choices given above. Unlock provides access to the page, site, or pages containing the specified text, depending on which of these you have checked.
If you feel a web site was blocked unjustly, you can click Submit this link, which will send a report to Net Nanny. Net Nanny will examine the page and see if we feel it should not be blocked.
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